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From: Alex Kozhevnikov <alexkoz@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2020 16:39:01 +0000
Message-ID: <CANxDeMh3O=A0zBhdMo3E9W=7b_LEus9x_NRZELvERVz6q2buRA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [lojban] Sensations / qualia (colors etc.)
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So I'm very out of date and don't know any Lojban, but what happened
to xorlo and how it made "lo" extremely generic? Seems to me that this
means that "lo xunre" is just as much allowed to be the
essence/qualia/color of red as "lo cribe" is allowed to be a liquified
residue of a bear.

I guess the distinction is that I remembered "lo cribe" as basically
being anything that is in context sufficiently associated with the
concept of bear, and thus to me "lo xunre" is naturally anything that
is associated with the concept of red, which for me includes the
qualia of redness or whatever.

It has been so useful for me to be able to think of and refer to a
category broad enough to include "anything associated with the concept
of ...", and if the goal is to enable clarity of thought and
communication about cognition, then that seems like an essential
thing, because the activation of cognition due to it being strongly
enough associated with the currently active cognition is pretty much
one of the fundamental mechanisms by which minds like ours work.

I had (perhaps wrongly) interpreted "lo" as being intended to be broad
and flexible enough to support that usage. But if it is not, then I
sure hope there is another couple-phoneme one-syllable thing to use
instead of "lo" for that purpose.

To be clear, I fully support there being some way to explicitly narrow
down meaning to qualia specifically, and have no opinion about how to
do it. I also have no problem with there being a way to narrow meaning
down to "objects" that are in some sense "more object-like" than
qualia, and if "lo" is widely understood or intended to be the way to
do that, then cool.

But I am making the appeal that it is extremely useful and valuable to
be able to very efficiently and as a fundamental language feature like
"lo" to refer to something so broadly that the meaning could be
anything from a specific red thing to the qualia of redness to the
concept of redness or the association of redness.

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